Star Trek

Gomanson · Post by **Gomanson** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 8:20 pm

Star Trek characters often refer to four "quadrants" of our galaxy. Our solar system is apparently in the Alpha Quadrant, with a few races near and across the border of the Beta Quadrant. Is the Milky Way actually divided up this way? And a broader question: How detailed a map do we have of the Milky Way. Is the general shape and our position known? It would be neat if someone could give a description of exactly how the detail fades as the unniversal map radiates away from Earth.

SEmert · Post by **SEmert** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 9:58 pm

I think it's pretty well accepted the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy.

What I've seen more often is "arms" of the galaxy, referring to the different spiral arms. The Orion-Cygnus arm, the Sagittarius arm, the Perseus arm. We're in the Orion-Cygnus arm.

In a quick Google search I found this pretty decent web page: http://cassfos02.ucsd.edu/public/tutorial/MW.html
It even has some animations that are sort of related to what you're asking.

BTW, we did get a request on the MAS answering line a couple weeks ago from a person asking if we had any pictures of the Milky Way from the outside. Darn. I looked and looked, but just couldn't find one!

mlfj4901 · Post by **mlfj4901** » Fri Jun 03, 2005 8:31 am

Greetings,

The latest issue of Night Sky magazine had a large article with many pictures on the millky way. I don't know if it has what you're looking for, but it's a full of a lot of great stuff anyway. It's actually about taking picutres of the Milky Way in case you interested in that sort of thing

-matt

SEmert · Post by **SEmert** » Fri Jun 03, 2005 6:59 pm

Naah. Actually, I did find some material the person could use. Note I said, "from the Outside" -- he wanted a picture of the whole Milky Way galaxy, similar to a picture of M31. That one is kind of hard to get.

I pulled up pictures of a couple of spiral galaxies and explained to him that if you could look at the Milky Way from outside the galaxy, it would look similar to these, and we would be right about "here", more than halfway out one of the spiral arms.

Gomanson · Post by **Gomanson** » Sat Jun 04, 2005 9:51 am

Even is we shot a probe straight north out of the galaxy and it took a picture and sent it back, besides taking a whole lot of time to get the signal back, wouldn't the picture be distorted? Let's say the camera is 45 degrees above the galactic nucleus. The light reaching it from our region would be much newer light than the light reaching it from the far end. And if the galaxy is rotating and moving, wouldn't the image be distorted? Or is the motion of the galaxy too slow? And if that's the case, wouldn't pictures of galaxies farther away from us be more accurate than closer ones, as far as seeing the whole thing as it looks at one instant?

Help me out...trying to jump-start my brain this morning

Deane Clark · Post by **Deane Clark** » Sat Jun 04, 2005 3:44 pm

Gomanson wrote:Even is we shot a probe straight north out of the galaxy and it took a picture and sent it back, besides taking a whole lot of time to get the signal back, wouldn't the picture be distorted? Let's say the camera is 45 degrees above the galactic nucleus. The light reaching it from our region would be much newer light than the light reaching it from the far end. And if the galaxy is rotating and moving, wouldn't the image be distorted? Or is the motion of the galaxy too slow? And if that's the case, wouldn't pictures of galaxies farther away from us be more accurate than closer ones, as far as seeing the whole thing as it looks at one instant?

Help me out...trying to jump-start my brain this morning

Just think of it as though you were in M31 (Andromeda Galaxy) taking a picture of the Milky Way. Since the two galaxies are thought to be very similar, we would look to them pretty much the same as they look to us.

You are right that any snapshot of our galaxy from relatively close would be made up of photons of various ages, and thus the image of the far side would be from an earlier time than the near parts. However, the galaxy rotates every 250 million years at our radius, and it "only" takes light about 100,000 years to cross the whole thing, so the smearing effect would be minimal.

Someone at an Onan Public Night once asked me if we had ever sent a space probe to another galaxy. My answer was the obvious "No, it would take too long." But, afterwards, I thought about how most people don't realize how really insanely huge the universe is (borrowing from HHGTTG). I did the math later and found that even the fastest space probe we have launched (Voyager 2 is going about 10 mi/sec I believe) would take between 70,000 and 100,000 years to get to the nearest STAR, the heck with leaving our galaxy.

Re: quadrants -
At the risk of looking geekier than I already do, I recall that on Star Trek, they just arbitrarily divided the galaxy into four parts or quadrants which were 90 degree wide pie slices centered on the galaxy's center. Nowhere in my astronomy education have I ever seen this arrangement used officially.

Our current map of the Milky way is rather detailed near by and very fuzzy on the far side of the center. I believe current thinking is that it is a barred spiral. Hopefully, with the new infrared space observatories, this will get much more detailed in the near future.

SEmert · Post by **SEmert** » Sat Jun 04, 2005 5:06 pm

TOA03002 wrote:At the risk of looking geekier than I already do, I recall that on Star Trek, they just arbitrarily divided the galaxy into four parts or quadrants which were 90 degree wide pie slices centered on the galaxy's center.

Just to show you there are much geekier people out there than you, there are those of us that played the early Star Trek computer games on either 8 bit computers (earlier than PC) or as timesharing programs on old computers. On those games, they actually divided up the galaxy into 64 "quadrants" on an 8x8 grid. Sort of contradicts the term quadrant, though. But at least then you had a chance of encountering something unknown as you moved from one quadrant to another.

ashutoshl · Post by **ashutoshl** » Sat Jun 04, 2005 8:52 pm

On those games, they actually divided up the galaxy into 64 "quadrants" on an 8x8 grid. Sort of contradicts the term quadrant, though.

Was that similar to a chess board ?

SEmert · Post by **SEmert** » Sun Jun 05, 2005 3:10 pm

The layout was similar, but that is about the only similarity there was to a chessboard.

You'd tell the Enterprise to travel at a certain vector at a certain warp factor, and you'd be deposited in a quadrant. When you arrived in the quadrant there could be a Starbase there where you could replenish supplies, or more likely Klingons or Romulans to fight. You had both phasers and photon torpedos for weapons. In typical shoot-em-up fashion, you'd get more points for killing off the Romulans or Klingons in fewer shots.

Looking back, it wasn't all that imaginative. At least Captain Kirk would negotiate with the enemy or outsmart them usually instead of blowing them up.

Deane Clark · Post by **Deane Clark** » Sun Jun 05, 2005 7:48 pm

SEmert wrote:You'd tell the Enterprise to travel at a certain vector at a certain warp factor, and you'd be deposited in a quadrant. When you arrived in the quadrant there could be a Starbase there where you could replenish supplies, or more likely Klingons or Romulans to fight.

So, basically, Risk in space?

ashutoshl · Post by **ashutoshl** » Sun Jun 05, 2005 10:00 pm

That kind of arrangement would however be only a two dimensional layout ? Say if one wanted to visit a glob cluster in the halo, that would be impossible right ?

rbubany · Post by **rbubany** » Mon Jun 06, 2005 6:49 am

I think I remember that game or a version of it. Didn't you get a small chance of survival when you got blown up by reincarnating on the good ship "Fairie Queen"?

mlfj4901 · Post by **mlfj4901** » Mon Jun 06, 2005 9:41 am

Greetings,

reincarnating on the good ship "Fairie Queen"?

What kind of game was this exactly?

-matt

rbubany · Post by **rbubany** » Mon Jun 06, 2005 10:23 am

The one I'm thinking of was very simple. You selected a "quadrant". When you got there you would find out that there were x number of Klingon's in the area.

Then you would take a couple iof "hits".

You had to calculate the coordinates of a Klingon and then fire a torpedo. If you missed, you usually got hit again.

Object was to clear all quadrants of Klingons.

I played a mainframe version of it which was all text based. Was reincarnated as the Fairie Queen many times. The Fairie Queen never survived very long.

Finally, one great day I blasted the LAST Klingon, and the online program abended.

mlfj4901 · Post by **mlfj4901** » Mon Jun 06, 2005 10:16 pm

Then you would take a couple iof "hits".

once again I ask....what kind of a game was this?!?!?

-matt

SEmert · Post by **SEmert** » Mon Jun 06, 2005 11:25 pm

Ron, Matt's interpreting this game the wrong way... I think we'd better give up while we are ahead!

BTW, I never got rescued by the Fairie Queen. Nor did I have the mainframe version of Star Trek abend.

However, while playing the original text-based Adventure game on a mainframe during the day, I did cause the entire system to crash. Oops.

Starforce2 · Post by **Starforce2** » Mon Jun 06, 2005 11:29 pm

It certainly was no bridge commander...

http://bridgecommander.filefront.com/potd/37300
http://bridgecommander.filefront.com/potd/35958
http://bridgecommander.filefront.com/potd/37403
http://bridgecommander.filefront.com/potd/37346
http://bridgecommander.filefront.com/potd/35306
http://bridgecommander.filefront.com/potd/37964
http://bridgecommander.filefront.com/potd/37999
http://bridgecommander.filefront.com/potd/37716
http://bridgecommander.filefront.com/potd/38134

youngsww · Post by **youngsww** » Tue Jun 07, 2005 2:16 am

Catalogueing Gaseous Anomalies?

I do that everytime my wife, two sons, dog and two cats are in the room!!!

John Young

rbubany · Post by **rbubany** » Tue Jun 07, 2005 6:37 am

Ron, Matt's interpreting this game the wrong way... I think we'd better give up while we are ahead!

I guess I was interpreting Matt the wrong way. Who would have thought...